The Wimbledon Poisoner Read online

  ‘Why have you gone into the law?’ she used to say to him. ‘You’re better than that, aren’t you?’ In fact, Henry’s real problem with the law was that he wasn’t quite up to it. Even after eighteen years at Harris, Harris and Overdene he was, he reflected, about as much in the dark on legal questions as Donald was on medical issues. Which was saying something. Henry’s mother had, he recalled bitterly, thought that he could ‘do better’ than Elinor as well. ‘It all depends,’ Henry had said, ‘what you are looking for in a relationship!’ In those days Henry had talked like that. Well, if you were looking for the qualities Elinor had displayed in their years together, you could probably only have done better by marrying a man-eating tiger.

  But of course, once Mrs Farr Senior had expressed doubts about a woman, it meant Henry was almost duty bound to marry her, just as, as soon as she expressed a political or aesthetic opinion, he immediately experienced a passionate surge of enthusiasm for the view most directly opposed to it. He was almost as hostile to his own mother as he was to Elinor’s, even though the politesse observed by his family meant he had not yet worked out a way of expressing it. In the thirty-six years of which he had conscious memory of Mrs Farr Senior, their relationship had never developed beyond the ‘isn’t it a nice day?’ stage. They had never had an argument, apart from one occasion in 1956, when Henry refused to wear a pair of short trousers. Henry’s mother still referred to this argument.

  ‘You remember . . .’ she would say coquettishly, ‘when you made that awful fuss about the trousers . . .’

  Thinking about his mother brought Henry back to the matter in hand and, grim faced, he went out to the car to retrieve the chicken. He had left it on the passenger seat, where it lay, legs in the air, headless rump deep in the upholstery. It was only when he was reaching across for it that he remembered. Those three stolen sheets from Donald’s prescription pad. All it needed was someone to go looking for the jack, find their hands curling round them and start asking why . . .

  You couldn’t be too careful. Everything had to be very, very carefully done indeed.

  Henry yanked out the jack, groped for the papers and stuffed them into his pocket. Just as he did so, a voice behind him said, ‘I’ve got an awful headache!’

  Elinor. Headache. How to respond. Henry tried out a little gasp of sympathy. ‘Oh no!’ he said. He sounded, he thought, almost openly satirical. ‘One of your headaches again!’

  This was supposed to be said in the tone of one dealing with news of some immense natural disaster. It came out as positively offensive disbelief. Henry turned to her and held up the jack. Appealing for clemency.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I found the jack!’

  She sniffed.

  ‘Put it in the shed!’ she said.

  Henry leered at her.

  ‘And I got a chicken,’ he said, ‘the kind you like!’

  And kohlrabi and okra and chilli and pastrami and thallium!

  She frowned at the pavement.

  ‘When you’ve put the jack away,’ she said, ‘could you get in the car and go and get Maisie from ballet?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Henry.

  She thrust her white face towards him. She looked as if she was in pain. Her eyebrows, Henry noted, were curiously thick. Black and bushy. Like a gorilla’s, he thought.

  ‘You block me,’ she said. ‘You block my creativity!’

  ‘Sorry!’ said Henry.

  She swung her bottom south-south-west and steered herself off up the path. As Henry watched her retreating buttocks, grinding out yet another dismissal, he tried to remember if there had ever been a time, years ago, when he had desired her. Or had she just seen him one day, walking around the suburb where he had been born, and said to him, in that sharp voice she used for all commands: ‘Marry me!’

  There was probably a man, somewhere, who could cope with Elinor. Ten feet tall and eight feet wide. With no nerves.

  Henry went to the front hall, put the chicken and the jack on the table by the front door and trudged back out to the Passat. It looked smug, Henry thought, about the fact that he was going to have to drive it again. As he drove off down the street he saw the curtains of the front bedroom close. Elinor was going to have her sleep. She always needed a sleep after therapy. An hour or so spent talking with other women about how weak, cruel, uncaring, lazy and insensitive their husbands were always made her tired.

  ‘Oh Maisie,’ thought Henry, ‘you who are, even now, longing to get your fat little feet out of the ballet pumps that you will never wear gracefully, soon we will be free of her. Soon we will not have to go to ballet or piano or junior aerobics. We can go wherever we like.’

  Actually, if he were offered the choice of going wherever he liked in the world, he would probably choose Wimbledon. The tribal customs of Wimbledon were, in Henry’s view, as worthy of study as the totems and taboos of the Aborigines of the Northern Territory. The stories of the suburb, the tales that gave number 24, 59, 30 or 47 their right to their homes, these were, in their way, as substantial as the creation myths of the Eskimos. Passats, BMWs, dormer windows, back extensions, wooden garden sheds, all meant something more than at first appeared – white wooden railings, gold name-plates on doors, stained-glass windows in bathrooms, net curtains, numbered dustbins, unnumbered dustbins, sash windows, plate-glass windows, windows with double glazing, windows without double glazing, walls painted white, all of this was part of a body of myth as strange and mysterious as the Epic of Gilgamesh. What was the relationship between new roofs and marital discord? Why did people who put adverts for local fêtes in their windows so often neglect the paint on their woodwork? The codes of Wimbledon were too strange and complex to be understood by its inhabitants. It needed some stranger to unlock it, to explain it to itself, to see behind that apparent silence and quietness.

  Wimbledon. Its architecture compared favourably with that of northern France (bar one or two cathedrals). Its cuisine was as varied as Hong Kong or Bangkok (you could eat as well at the Mai Thai restaurant, Wimbledon Broadway, as in anywhere around the Gulf of Thailand). Its history, if you skipped a thousand years, was as violent as Phnom Penh’s or Smolensk’s. The things the Vikings had done in Raynes Park were, let’s face it, unspeakable.

  Why, Henry wondered, was he getting defensive about Wimbledon? Who was attacking it? Perhaps it was that letter from that bastard up in town. That—

  Dear Mr Farr,

  Thank you for your letter and thank you for letting us see your nine-volume Complete History of Wimbledon. It’s a massive work and has obviously taken a great deal of your time and trouble.

  I fear, however, that a detailed analysis of a suburb, especially a not particularly well-known one like Wimbledon, would not ‘travel’ well in our terms. I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean when I say that a reader in, for example, Moscow would find your book very difficult to relate to. For a book to have truly international appeal, it must have, well, truly international appeal!

  We all loved the chapter about Victorian Wimbledon though. Might not this make a pamphlet of some kind? Perhaps for your local historical society?

  Best wishes,

  Karim Jackson.

  Henry’s hands tightened on the wheel as he thought about Karim Jackson’s letter. There were people in Moscow, New York, Rome, Paris, Oslo and Naples who were absolutely dying to find out about Wimbledon. Wimbledon was as much a mystery to them as was the Orinoco to Henry. All he had to do, he knew, was get the thing in print.

  Why had this Pakistani – if he was a Pakistani – got it in for him? Why did he take this extraordinarily negative attitude to the most important suburb in the Western world? Was it something to do with tennis? They played cricket in Pakistan, didn’t they? Was that the problem? And more importantly than that, what was a Pakistani doing in a position of power and influence in a publishing house? The man (if it was a man) was probably a fairly junior member of the firm; if only Henry could find a way of getting past him to the people rea
lly in the driving seat.

  He mustn’t think about his book. Thinking about his book was almost worse than thinking about Elinor. He would think about what his mother always used to call ‘nice things’. ‘Think about nice things!’ she would say to Henry as she tucked him into bed at night. And, as he coasted towards Maple Drive through the suburb’s still deserted streets, Henry thought about nice things. He thought about thallium and the Guillain-Barré Syndrome and whether it was or wasn’t too late to have Elinor heavily insured.

  8

  Everything happened very quickly after he had got Maisie back to the house.

  Elinor was still asleep. Before she should have a chance to wake and discover the edenwort, Henry got to work on the supper. Maisie sat in the corner of the kitchen with one chocolate bar in her mouth, another in her right hand, another in her lap and a fourth beside her on the draining board, in case anything should happen to the other three.

  Henry paused over a half-dismembered edenwort. He had better catch up on Elinor’s latest batch of instructions.

  She wrote him notes. Notes saying what to get for supper, notes telling him not to leave his shoes by the bed . . . sometimes she left him notes telling him how she felt. About life, about the world, and above all, about him. Since she had started going to therapy, these notes had got longer and more articulate. They didn’t start ‘Dear Henry’, or ‘My Dear Husband’, but simply began, picking up (as her therapist had taught her) at ‘the moment of rage’. There was one, now, lurking in the vegetable basket and Henry moved towards it as one might move towards an unexploded bomb.

  Why do you not understand my needs as a woman? You do not commit to the home, do you, Henry? You are (I have to say) intensely judgemental. You block and deny my aspirations to creativity and permanence.

  Elinor attended art classes at Wimbledon School of Art. She was particularly keen on pottery, a skill she had, in Henry’s view, even less hope of acquiring than her daughter.

  You deal death to the need in me to grow and change and become myself. Like a huge wall that shields tender shoots from the light, you do not allow my passions and sensations their scope. I am afraid of you, Henry!

  Not half as much as I am of you! thought Henry, as he ran his eyes down the rest of the manuscript (she must have written it before going to sleep).

  I am afraid of the male violence that is in you. In a world run by men, for men . . .

  Maybe, thought Henry, but, if so, run by other men for other men. I am not one of these men!

  A world of cruel greed, rape, nuclear war, phallocentric control, where women are pushed to the sidelines, how can I not be afraid of you? With the fierce hatred that I know is in you? Like a mugger you leap out at me from the dark, and my rights as a woman are violated by your obscene masculinity!

  Henry looked at himself in the kitchen mirror, as he crumpled up the other three pages of this latest missive and threw it in the swingbin. He looked, he had to admit, the very picture of obscene masculinity. Glumly, he began to pull out okra and edenwort. If she didn’t eat the vegetables, she was almost sure to eat the meat.

  Elinor was a star pupil in her therapy class. Having been taught, first at an expensive public school and then at Oxford University, to express herself to order, she found the poor creatures who shambled along to 23 Dorman Road every Saturday, Thursday, Monday and Wednesday absolutely no competition at all. Most of these women had been in what they called ‘the therapy situation’ for years. Elinor’s difficulties were, at least from her description of the classes, bigger and better than those of her fellow therapees. She was a kind of Stakhanovite worker in the field of female suffering, setting new targets for pain, finding each week some new emotional cross to bear. The main topic on the agenda of the therapy class was, to start with anyway, Henry. They all sat around in a circle agreeing what a swine Henry was.

  But as the therapy continued, Henry had observed, others were found to be guilty of the capital crime of blocking Elinor’s creativity. There were other saboteurs and wreckers, Trotskyists and double-dealing spies, who, sneakily and shamefully, crept about, blocking Elinor’s rightful place as an internationally acclaimed oil painter, star newspaper columnist or opera singer. Her mother for a start.

  At first, Henry had not been able to believe that her therapist had got it so right. If anyone had prevented Elinor from being an oil executive, or a leading novelist and short-story writer, it was Elinor’s mother, a small, heavily built woman with a squint, who lived very near the Sellafield atomic reactor. Principally because Elinor’s mother was completely without talent for anything apart from giving men a hard time and had, presumably, passed on her genes to her daughter.

  The therapist, apparently, while finding her mother guilty of the hideous and anti-state offence of blocking Elinor’s creativity, took the view that she had managed to do this by getting Elinor to love her too much. How she worked this out was a mystery to Henry, since her mother’s role in Elinor’s life was confined to twice-yearly visits in which she sat in their front room and listened to Elinor telling her how awful Henry was.

  He put the chicken in a roasting bag and felt in his pocket for the vial of thallium.

  ‘Ugh!’ said Maisie. ‘Chicken.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Henry, ‘you can fill up on choc bars and then pretend to eat it and when she isn’t looking I’ll sling it in the bin.’

  ‘Good!’ said Maisie.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch a mouthful of it myself,’ said Henry, ‘it’s that healthy free-range chicken that she likes . . .’

  ‘Yuk!’ said Maisie.

  While she was munching her way through her third chocolate bar, Henry took the chicken through to the scullery and carefully anointed its breast with the thallium. On top of the thallium he sprinkled salt, a very little pepper and a coating of tarragon leaves. It was six thirty.

  Back in the kitchen, he cleaned the edenwort and the okra and chopped them up small enough to be unrecognizable. He whistled as he chopped and, as he tipped the vegetables into the frying pan, he sang, to the tune of ‘Candy Man Blues’, the following song:

  Thallium

  Thallium

  Guillain-Barré

  Thallium

  Thallium Thallium

  Thallium Guillain-Barré.

  Underneath the frying pan was another note.

  You hate women, don’t you? Why do you hate women? Why are you so frightened of them? Why do you seek to destroy them? To caricature them? Is it their creative potential that frightens you? Their menstrual power? Their child-bearing power? Is it their fund of womanliness you hate? Don’t you hate women, Henry?

  Henry couldn’t think of a woman he disliked apart from Elinor. And, of course, Elinor’s mother.

  How would Elinor’s mother react to her daughter’s death? Henry had a feeling that she would take it well. She had taken her husband’s brain tumour like a . . . well, like a man. ‘OK,’ her square jaw seemed to say, ‘Derek has a brain tumour. That happens. We can deal with it!’ And she and her daughter had dealt with it. They had coped. They had certainly coped a lot better than Elinor’s father, a man Henry had always liked. The news of his impending death had badly ruffled his composure. He had talked wildly about the meaning of life, the emptiness of it all, the lack of scope offered by the Guardian Building Society. Elinor and her mother had clearly found all this in bad taste.

  ‘Daddy is depressed,’ they would say, narrowing their eyes and tilting their square chins downward, ‘very, very depressed. About the fact that he is dying.’

  They clearly felt he should have taken a more manly approach to the brain tumour. A man who had such a positive attitude towards Do It Yourself could surely have used some of that energy to combat the decay of his central nervous system. Henry thought about his father-in-law’s funeral, as he placed the Chicken Thallium in the oven, and then checked his watch again. He thought about the dignified posture of Elinor and Elinor’s mother, about how good they looked in black, ab
out how they retained their composure even as the oblong box containing Derek slid off through a gap in the crematorium wall. About how, as Elinor and Elinor’s mother stood by the flowers in the rain at Putney Vale Crematorium, someone had said to him, ‘They’re taking it very well!’ Of course they were, thought Henry, they couldn’t give a toss about the poor bastard.

  He would wear his black leather jacket at Elinor’s funeral. And the green socks. And the red shoes. He would deck himself out in the kind of clothes that would give most offence to her were she alive. And if Elinor’s mother should break down he would sob operatically and people would say to each other, as he stood by the flowers afterwards, ‘My, my. He is taking it badly.’

  It was six forty-five. He turned the oven on to 250 and put the okra and the edenwort on to a low heat. In approximately one hour she would be getting her chops round the first succulent mouthful of Chicken Thallium. By midnight she would be experiencing severe abdominal discomfort.

  Whistling to himself, Henry laid the table, while, in the corner of the kitchen, Maisie finished her last chocolate bar and got to work on a packet of crisps, a tube of Rolos, half a pound of jelly babies and a jumbo bar of Turkish delight. As she ate she cast worried glances up towards the cupboard by the stove, where lay a small sack of potato crisps, some Liquorice Allsorts and two packets of biscuits. Sometimes Henry wondered whether the junk food industry was going to be able to take the kind of demands Maisie was going to make on it in the years ahead.

  Occasionally, for some obscure reason of her own, Elinor was pleasant. Henry could not quite work out why, since her pleasantness was not always followed by a request for money or some other favour; perhaps she was remembering something he had quite forgotten, an incident during their courtship perhaps (they must have had a courtship) or a Henry, now lost to Henry himself, who could have inspired feelings such as pleasure. Or perhaps this was part of some internal clock of hers and, at some moments, often weeks or months apart, Elinor was programmed to be briefly but definitely pleasant.